Sequels and Spectacles

I’m not a fan of summer. Having grown up in one of Florida’s touristy coastal façade-towns, I’ve had more than my share of excess heat and sunlight. I do, however, enjoy fireballs and fakery of a different kind—the ones found at the multiplex. Thank goodness, I say, for Hollywood, which takes the hot months as an opportunity to flash its biggest stars, biggest explosions, biggest budgets, and biggest indulgences with a dazzling display of sequels and spectacles. Now, I know it’s fashionable amongst critic types to decry the blockbuster impulse, and there’s certainly a place for deriding its unrepetentent shallowness, but for those whose first movie loves were films like Star Wars, Aliens, Terminator 2, and Indiana Jones, the popcorn pleasures of summer will always retain a special charm.

This summer comes fully loaded with action-heavy franchise fun. The megabudget pictures that are setting my geek heart a twitter are Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men 3: The Last Stand , Superman Returns, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans’ Chest, and Miami Vice. Poseidon, yet another Wolfgang Petersen boat disaster film (there must really be a market for watery apocalypse pics, or maybe it's just the last remnants of Titanic mania), also promises big heart, big boats and big waves, and, dicey religious implications or no, The Da Vinci Code will probably end up as a serviceably slick conspiracy thriller. Not all of these—maybe even none of them—will succeed, even at the limited goal of being a reasonable popcorn flick. The summer movie season always comes with dissapointment—sometimes a lot of it.

But the good news is that Fat Harry says our summer kickoff, Mission: Impossible 3, is the best gadget-crazy spy flick ever, even better than True Lies, and, even aside from the gloriously perverse presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman in the baddie role, that’s enough of a recommendation to get me interested. The unanswered question, of course, is whether or not it’s better than 24. Somehow, I just can’t see Tom Cruise killing a government protected witness and demanding a hacksaw.